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Nothing breaks a good war like distance
Like any a good fantasy world, Godslost has its own concept of distance. After all, why would the people of Godslost make reference to a mile? That would make things too easy for us as readers.
The intention with these books is clearly that those diving into Godslost can do so with enough knowledge to navigate the place, including in deciphering distance. But for some that will not be enough. After all, why is a skip called a skip? That’s a good one, and worth a chuckle in its own right, and you’ll find out more below – the definitive guide to deciphering distance in Godslost.
Note – this blog is intended to be a living record, being updated as the adventures of Godslost spread wider and further. Make sure to check back!
The Mikaetan Empire has dominated the western half of Godslost for almost eight hundred years, albeit greatly diminished in the last hundred and fifty. As such, the Empire has shaped distance in Western Godslost, and continues to do so.
Skip
This is one of Villas the Unit’s finest achievements (and in finest we mean craziest). Villas the Unit is explored a little further in the blog about time, but units of distance are where his madness really shines through.
In the reign of the Unit, the south and the north of the Empire had different units of distance with the same name: a span. These differences created havoc with traders who took advantage by “buying at a northern span and selling at a southern” – pocketing the difference at the expense of the unsuspecting customer. This caused such havoc with legal disputes that one day Villas the Unit flipped. Or actually skipped. He raged at his aides, skipped, and declared that the unit of measurement for length should be based on the distance he had just moved. Hence a skip. The problem was that no-one formally measured it, so a skip is not actually very well defined (though it is more consistent than a span).
For an Earth comparison, a skip is approximately equal to a metre
Kilo-Skip
You may imagine that a kilo-skip is 1,000 skips, and you’d be wrong. It’s actually 1,024 skips. We mention in the blog about time that Villas the Unit is obsessed with the divisibility of the number 16, and 1,000 is not a multiple of 16. But 1,024 is (a bit like where a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes in a computer). Hence a kilo-skip is actually 1,024 skips.